orgotten until his fingers went groping for a bullet at the next daybreak. Kaffirs were then trying to rush my cousins’ laager.
“Wild Kaffirs 杭州桑拿按摩哪儿好 these were, driven from
Kimberley for unruliness in drink. They were going back to their tribe; they had come far without food, and they smelled the meat and meal in the wagons—so Matakit afterward told. But no hunger could have driven them against a Boer laager. They mistook the wagons for the wagons of Englishmen.”
The French Canadians smiled unoffended, but my jaws snapped. Swartz turned to me courteously:
“They mistook the wagons for those of English traders unskilled in arms and
trekking provisions to the mines. Though their first rush showed them their mistake, 杭州油压哪家好 they went mad over their losses and came on twice more. Then they guessed, from the way my cousins reserved their fire, that their ammunition was low. So Matakit howled them on for a fourth rush.
“My cousins and their six Christian Kaffirs were now in alarm, 杭州下城区不正规的足浴店 for their cartridges were nearly all gone. It was then that Vassell’s fingers groped in his elephant-bullet pouch, where he felt something rounding out the leather. That was the forgotten pebble. But its bigness was too great for the muzzle-loading elephant-rifle. So my cousin rammed it into the wide-mouthed, old-fashioned roer, a blunderbuss that our fathers’ fathers praised because it frightened Kaffirs more than it hurt them. In justice to the roer it should have been loaded with a handful of slugs. But with only powder and the pebble it made such flash and noise 杭州洗浴中心过夜 that all the living wild blacks, but one, ran away howling. The one that fell before Vassell’s pebble was the biggest of all, and their leader. There he lay kicking and bellowing like a buffalo bull, ten yards from the 海纳百川4楼全套多少钱 wagons.
“‘While he bawled we knelt in the laager,’ Vassell told me, ‘and we offered up thanks for this our deliverance, even like unto the deliverance of David by the pebble of the brook.’
“Then they ate breakfast while their Kaffirs inspanned, and still the wild one roared.
“‘It would be merciful, brother Vassell,’ said Claas as they drank coffee, ‘to put the Lord’s creature out of his pain.’
“‘Nay,’ said Vassell; ‘my conscience will not consent to what Free State law might call murder. And, moreover, the Kaffir’s pain is a plain judgment of the Almighty.’ Vassell is a dopper, like Oom Paul, and a dopper is 杭州洗浴爽记 quick to see the Almighty operating through himself. So they left the black thief gnashing, with five more who lay still, meat for vultures’ beaks or lions’ jaws.
“In four or five hours’ time my cousins were nigh to Truter’s drift on the Modder. There they saw two Englishmen and one Israelite digging into the blue-clay shoal.
“‘Good day,’ shouts Claas. ‘What are you digging for?’
“‘Diamonds, Dutchman, d—n you,’ said the Englishmen, laughing.
“They came up out of the river-bed and showed my cousins four small rough stones which they had found elsewhere.
“Vassell looked closely at the stones. Then he knew that his pebble had been a great gem. He put innocent, simple dopper questions ab